The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has been voted the best Cabinet role model for 1990s parents, while Robin Cook is the worst, according to a new survey.
Cherie Blair is seen as successfully combining her roles as mother, Prime Minister's wife and career woman by 51 per cent of people polled for the launch edition of M, a new magazine for parents. But one in five say she appears ill-at-ease standing on the sidelines on public occasions. Only 7 per cent say she is a terrific role model for working mothers.
Among Cabinet ministers, 46 per cent say the Prime Minister, a father of three, is the best role model for 1990s parents. But Cook, the Foreign Secretary, who grabbed the headlines last year for leaving his wife of 28 years to marry his secretary, was seen as the worst parental role model.
The former US presidential hopeful, Bob Dole, yesterday expressed solidarity with the families of Bosnia's 17,000 missing, but advised them not to expect quick answers.
Dole, on his second visit to Bosnia this year as chairman of the International Commission on Missing Persons, said progress was being made in finding those missing from the 1992-1995 war, notably by mass-grave exhumations.
"But I don't think that families should enter into the illusion that it's going to happen in a month or six months or a year," he said in Sarajevo.
The wife of Italy's cycle-mad Prime Minister, Romano Prodi, has had her bike stolen, Italian media reported yesterday. Flavia Prodi's bicycle was taken from a rack in the couple's home town of Bologna earlier this month.